Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

Six hours, Quellen thought. Plus or minus. And then Lanoy would be in custody.

But Norm Pomrath would be a hopper by then.

Brogg said in a relaxed tone, “I have to arrest you, of course. You understand that. It’s regulations.”

“Of course,” Lanoy said. “It goes almost without saying. I wondered what took you people so long to get to me.”

“Uncertainty in high places. There was a lot of dithering.” Brogg smiled at the little man. “I don’t mind telling you, you have the High Government quite upset. They’re sweating to arrest you, but at the same time they’re afraid of wrecking their position of power through some sort of rearrangement of past events. So they’ve been stalemated. It’s the classic conflict situation: they must stop you, and they don’t dare it.”

“I appreciate their troubles,” said Lanoy. “It’s a terribly complicated life even for Them, isn’t it? Well, you’re here, now. Come outside. Let’s watch the sunset, shall we?”

Brogg followed Lanoy from the shack. It was late, now, well into his overtime phase, but Brogg did not object. All day long he and Leeward had zeroed in on Lanoy, juggling televector constants until they had located him within a narrowing radius. As Brogg had told Quellen earlier in the day, it was only a matter of hours. In fact, it had taken four hours and some minutes from the time of Brogg’s call. Deftly, Brogg had sent Leeward off on a wild goose chase an hour ago. Now Brogg and Lanoy were alone at this remote shack. Brogg had much to say to the hopper man.

A swollen golden sun hung suspended in the darkening sky. The track of illumination cast a purplish glow over the polluted lake. It took on an eerie glitter, and the slime-creatures that writhed on its surface seemed ennobled by the aura of the dying day. Lanoy stared raptly into the west.

“It is beautiful,” he said finally. “I could never leave this era, UnderSec Brogg. I see the beauty within the ugliness. Regard that lake. Was there ever anything like it? I stand here at sunset each night in awe.”

“Remarkable.”

“Very. There’s poetry in that ooze. The oxygen’s just about gone, you see. There’s been a devolution of organic life there, so that we’ve got only anaerobic forms. I like to think that the sludgeworms dance down there at sunset. About, about, in reel and rout. Look at the play of colours on that big swatch of algae. It grows as long as seaweed here. Do you care for poetry much, Brogg?”

“My passion’s for history.”

“What period?”

“Roman. The early Empire. Tiberius through Trajan, approximately. Trajan’s time: a true golden age.”

“The Republic doesn’t interest you?” asked Lanoy. “The brave puritans? Cato? Lucius Junius Brutus? The Gracchi?” Brogg was astounded. “You know such things?”

“I cast a wide net,” said Lanoy. “You realize that I deal with the past on a daily basis. I’ve acquired a certain familiarity with history myself. Trajan, eh? You’d like to visit Rome of Trajan’s era, would you?”

“Of course,” Brogg said huskily.

“What about Hadrian? Still a golden age there. If you couldn’t have Trajan, would you settle for Hadrian? Let us say, a margin of error covering a generation—we might miss Trajan, but in that case we’d land somewhere in Hadrian. We’d do better to aim for the forward end of Trajan’s rule. Otherwise the error might take us the other way, and you wouldn’t like that, eh? You’d come out in Titus, Domitian, one of that nasty bunch. Not at all to your liking.”

Brogg could manage only a hoarse, croaking voice. “What are you talking about?”

“You know quite well.” The sun had set. The magic glow ebbed from the ruined lake. “Shall we go in?” Lanoy asked. “I’ll show you some of the equipment.”

Brogg allowed himself to be led back inside. He towered over the little man; Lanoy was no bigger than Koll, and had something of Koll’s nervous inner energy. Yet Koll brimmed with hatred and pustulence; Lanoy seemed utterly confident, with a core of tranquillity within his active dynamism.

Lanoy opened a door in the partition that divided the building. Brogg peered in. He saw vertical bars of some gleaming material, an openwork cage, dials, switches, an array of rheostats. Rows of colour-coded panels on the machinery radiated bright glows of data. It all seemed to be put together with an eye towards deliberate confusion.

“This is the time-travel machine?” Brogg asked.

“Part of it. There are extensions both in time and space. I won’t plague you with the details. The principle is simple, anyway. A sudden strain on the fabric of the continuum; we thrust present-day material in, scoop out an equal buckeload of mass from the past. Conservation of matter, you understand. When our calculations are off by a few grammes, it causes disturbances, implosions, meteorological effects. We try not to miss, but we sometimes do. There’s a fusion plasma at the heart of it all. No better way to rip open the continuum; we use our own little sun to do it. We tap off the theta force, you see. Every time someone uses a stat, it builds up temporal potential that we grab and utilize. Even so, it’s an expensive process.”

“What do you charge for a trip?”

“Two hundred units, generally. That is, if we’re willing to take money at all.”

“You send some people free?” Brogg asked.

“Not exactly. We won’t accept the money of certain individuals, I mean. We insist on payment of a different kind—services, information, that sort of thing. If they’re not willing to render what we need, we don’t transport them. For those people, no amount of money could hire us.”

“I don’t altogether follow.”

“You will,” Lanoy said. He closed the partition and returned to the office part of the shack. Sprawling out comfortably in his web, he asked Brogg, “What arrest procedure are you going to follow in my case?”

“You’ll have to come down to the office to talk to CrimeSec Quellen. He’ll have disposition of the case. Meanwhile we’ll have to cordon this place off with a wide-band radion, and it’ll remain sealed pending appeal. Any habeas corpus will go automatically to the High Government. Of course, if you can handle Quellen, the picture will change completely.”

“But I must go to the office?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of man is this Quellen? Malleable?”

“I think so. Especially if you use the right hammer on him,” Brogg said.

“Does the hammer have a high rental cost?”

“Not very high.” Brogg leaned forward. “Is your machine really limited to a reach of only five centuries?”

“Not at all. We keep improving. We’ve had a controlled reach of five centuries for quite some time, but an uncontrolled reach that’s much greater.”

“Yes,” said Brogg. “The pigs and dogs thrown back to the twelfth century, and such.”

“You know about those?”

“I’ve been very thorough. What’s your controlled reach now?”

Lanoy shrugged. “It’s variable. We can hit almost anywhere in two thousand years, but the built-in error gets wider the farther the throw. We’ve got it down to plus or minus thirty years now, but that’s quite a range. At the farthest, that is. We could hit 1492 or 1776 smack on the nose, I firmly believe.” He smiled. “What’s the hammer for pounding Quellen?”

“It’ll cost you,” said Brogg.

“What’s the cost of a ticket to Hadrian?”

“The hammer for Quellen.”

“You won’t take cash?”

“Not from you.”

Brogg nodded. “Let’s negotiate,” he said. “I think we can strike a deal.”

By sunset, Helaine Pomrath was convinced that her husband had become a hopper.